Sunshine & Noir & Wind

Even the trees are confused; their branches already laden, gilded in midwinter blossoms. Along this street they are lined like misplaced and motionless images from some distant, idyllic spring. I can hardly stand to be in the car, the air is hot and stale with a slight electric quality. When I open the door to the house, my dog barks for no reason. As the sun sets I hear sirens and I expect maybe the grass in the morning will be littered with scraps of what-have-you, detached palm fronds….

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Pause. Right there, I was about to describe the Santa Ana Winds. You see, my dear readership comprising of almost exclusively not Southern Californians, there are four types of distinguishable weather in Southern California: Sun, Earthquake Weather, Brush Fires, and Santa Ana Wind. I was about to tell you about these here Santa Anas we’ve been having, when I remembered that Joan Didion did it better in 1965. I do defer to Ms. Didion:

“There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sand storms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to flash point. For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night. I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air. To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior.”

California, the mythic and the bizarre!

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What this all apparently leads to for me at least, the lesson I was destined to learn this time via the prophetic and serendipitous nature of the hyperlink, is this: as I haphazardly googled my heart out in order to find a decent excerpt from Didion’s essay, I also happened upon a comment left by some bygone commenter on some bygone website…

“… (Didion) is such a gifted descriptive writer that she often can’t resist the temptation to wrap her otherwise keen observations with some Chandleresque hyperbole, just to see how the language turns out. It’s delightful to read, and leaves lasting impressions on your brain, but many of the impressions are, regrettably, not true…”

Have you ever heard a voice speaking through the void of years past and the awkward permanency of the internet and felt that it might be speaking, well, quite possibly directly at you? Hmph. It’s an odd feeling, really.

I’ve gotta go buckle down the hatches, the winds they are a’coming. Hold onto your Botox, SoCal.

Guitar Gods

He walks into the aucoustic guitar room, so quietly that I may not have noticed him had he not asked almost immediately:

“Hey, have you taken lessons?”

“Not really, maybe like two or three of them, and that was a long time ago,” I look up from the $400 guitar I had been playing to appraise this high pitched inquisitor.

“Oh,” he says, “Me neither.” He’s about four feet tall, Asian, and most certainly seven years old. He’s got round little glasses and a puffy black jacket. He’s freaking adorable. The kid picks up a guitar and sits down on the stool across from me. The guitar is markedly too big for him but he manages somehow to reach the strings. I stop playing and hold my breath because I’m almost certain I’m about to get schooled out of this Best Buy by a musical prodigy. Just my luck, I think. Here I am in this Best Buy, feeling pretty OK about my mediocre ability to have a good time playing the guitars, and this kid walks in.

“Do you have a guitar strap?” he asks all of a sudden, before playing a single chord.

“No, I don’t have one,”

“I really, really want one.” He looks down a the guitar which is black and larger than his entire body. “I’ve never played on a real guitar like this before. But I need a big one. A big one to play Blackbird on.” He sighs and starts playing the first couple notes. He’s not bad. He may be prodigy material, but I’m relieved to realize that I’m not about to get totally blown out of the water. Phew, that was a close one. We both keep playing, a dissonant duet: me whatever I was already playing, he the first three notes of Blackbird over and over again.

“Do you get finger picking?” He stops playing and looks over at me.

“Not entirely: It’s pretty tough, right?”

“Yeah, it’s really hard! I don’t get finger picking!”

“Well I bet if you keep practicing one day you’ll be really, really good.” Suddenly I realize I’m sitting at a different end of that proverbial table, you know, the one that turns on around you without even making a sound. No longer am I the kid fooling around with the guitar in the shop (for me it was Redemption Song, not Blackbird) but instead I’m the adult fooling around with the guitar in the shop and trying to offer advice that I (the kid me) never really followed. But this kid, maybe he’s smarter than I was; he smiles and doesn’t answer. Instead gets up to put the large guitar back on the rack. I offer him the one I had been playing, because it’s a bit smaller, in tune and it’s probably time for me to get going anyway.

“No thanks, I should probably leave this room too, before I break somethun,” as he follows me out the door. Ah, a pragmatist, after all.

Familial Counsel

What I’ve learned about myself and the world in general via family over the last few weeks, during which time I have had very little contact with anyone who is not related to me:

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Advice from Grandma:

“Words can never be unsaid.”

Never take a complement at face value. Most of the time they’re just flattering you in order to manipulate you.

If you need a date, just go to Whole Foods. You can pick him out of the lettuce section. “I always wear makeup to Whole Foods.”

Diagnosis from Mom:

“Well, you are a little retarded. Socially retarded.” (Feelings. Not. Hurt.)

“You need to be more feminine.” (No mom, I do not want to wear a fluffy lavender-colored sweater with a ruffled collar.)

Uncle Says:

Parker Schnabel. (He is a seventeen-year-old who runs a gold mine featured in the reality series “Gold Rush Alaska,” and for some reason has become somewhat of a hero around these parts. Seriously, on Christmas weekend we did not watch the football/basketball/whatever game. We watched re-runs of “Gold Rush” and rooted for Parker. Don’t ask me!)

Auntie Says:

“What would Parker Schnabel do?” (A question to ask oneself when faced with a tough decision.)

Constructive Criticism from Brother:

“Your guitar playing makes me want to blow my brains out.” Note that this is coming from the same guy who listens to Kings of Leon and also, confusingly, makes hasty generalizations like:

“Bob Dylan is the greatest musician of all time!”

Notes from Sister:

“You’re sooooo old! I don’t know anyone in 9th grade who has a sister as old as you!”  (Gee thanks, but really, don’t blame me for that one.)

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Can I go back to Berkeley now?

Land of Enchantment

What I could say about New Mexico is almost not worth the saying. As a geologist I see the rocks, as a physicist I see the light, as a mountain biker I see the trails. All the while I listen, trying to hear the words that come along with it all (iron seeped cliffs and resting lava flows, sagebrush and breathless cindercones,  painted sands and brown pueblos. Oh, and the sun, the sun, the watery sun!) but eventually realize that New Mexico by no means belongs to me. It’s a place so saturated by creation and myth and creation myth, that I’m certain New Mexico has been said better. It’s a place and a time you should see for yourself; how incredibly vast this country is!

From Georgia O’Keeffe,

From Not Georgia O’Keeffe,

And then there’s Beirut,

And for some reason, Scientists too: http://www.santafe.edu/

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Arizona Rambles and Cañon Grande (the big ditch)

Last two days in Arizona, coming to you from a motel room in Santa Fe, NM. 

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Gand Canyon National Park, Arizona

We step out of the car and in a few minutes we are walking the rim of the world! It really is better in real life, and at first sight of the Grand Canyon I am reminded of what made me fall in love with rocks a few years ago: Rocks tell histories, or  as Muir would have it they are ‘talkative.’ the Canyon is the most complete stratigraphic column in the world, some of the most ‘talkative’ rocks on Earth. I’m peering down for a glimpse of the vishnu schist and the Great Unconformity and other such stalwarts of Freshman Geology. It’s a bit hard though, as the Canyon is impossibly deep, there are people from every corner of the country dangling their legs stupidly off the edge,  my siblings are throwing snowballs at each other and one of them is wearing flipflops (“I’ll be fine. FINE!” Le Sigh. Later, frozen feet.) We don’t walk far on the rim trail, as per family in tow, but I can help but notice that every few meters the view changes: I see something I hadn’t noticed before, a different color in the layers, an exotic shade of light. Grand Canyon, I will be back.

In Between

Clapboard houses are strung sparse, mute in the samecolored desert—a rosaceae spectrum of blushing mounds—the washing out of canyonlands, grazed by gaunt and eyeless mules. Here, there is no echo: the plain rolls flush with sky and so there are instead women behind sandblown roadside selling tables, pineframed and draped in discolored bandañas. Laid out before them are polished hunks of turquoise, bits of iron wrought, feathered and beaded things, beaked kachinas. All this vanishes before red sand succumbs to vacuumlands, to breccia gravel and feathered grass—gold spread thin on blackened earth.*

Sunset Crater National Monument

VOLCANO! Have you ever walked on a snow covered lava flow in the shadow of an extinct cindercone?

Flagstaff

One night in town, and my sister and I make the front page of the local newspaper. Or, more accurately, our tiny heads in the crowd at the Flagstaff Pine cone drop did. Yes, New Year’s Eve Flagstaff has an electric, six foot tall pinecone drop. Flagstaff, who knew you could be so fun?

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*Yes, reading McCarthy still.

 

Scenes from Chandler

As it happens: Chandler, Arizona is exactly 666 miles away from a certain address on Bancroft Steps in Berkeley, California. Go figure, this being one of those prime happenstances in which fact is stranger than fiction. Of course, this calculation is according to the GPS system my dad uses to drive to the grocery store (everything around here looks the same, you see). He likes to play with the GPS, understandably. It’s something to pass the time at any rate, and when I’m in the car the chief entertainment seems to be changing the GPS direction lady’s voice settings to make her speak Swedish.

“Om 0,4 miles, sväng vänster…” she says in computerized stockholmska. “Sedan, om 0,6 miles sväng höger på Arizona Boulevard.” Weird, really, how Swedish and the desert just don’t mix. But my dad seems like he’s going to give it a try, at any rate. As I heard from him the other day:

“We’d like to put a gas line into the house you see, get a gas stove and maybe try and build a sauna out back.”

“A sauna? Like, for heat?” was my bewildered reply.

“Yeah, a sauna.”

“Can’t you just stand outside?” It’s the godforsaken desert, after all. You can’t even hardly swim in the pool in the summer because the water gets too hot.

“For the winter,” my dad parries back. I’ll have you know that today is December 30 and it is 70 F outside. Winter? Um…jag fattar verkligen inte vad han menar med detta…

Scenes from the Road: California to Arizona

Preface: My brother and I are driving across the American Southwest with two primary goals. One, to visit my Dad, his ladyfriend, and my younger siblings in the Sonoran *cough* Suburban desert town of Chandler Arizona (where I am now), and two, to visit my Grandma in her new place in the much anticipated Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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Temecula, CA

We pick up my grandpa at the Shell station on Route 79. He’s bumming a ride to Yuma to fetch his camper van, which he entrusted to some RV dealer to sell. Bum luck for the sale, it’s been, so he wants to get it from Yuma and drive it to a dealer in El Cajon. Good timing, grandpa. Your Chariot Awaits, and it’s called an Isuszu.

Highway 8

Our Isuszu is climbing into an alien landscape buttressed by pink granites (Orthoclase! Orthoclase!) interspersed with strokes of twisting sage. When we descend down the other side, she doesn’t need any gas and whizzes effortlessly by motorhomes towing trailers towing cars towing boats and whatnot in high gear. We’ve fallen into cloudless blue and alarmingly agricultural plans that end up in sand dunes somewhere past El Centro. Dune Buggies are crawling and rolling all over their granular slopes and the aforementioned motorhomes congregate in the foothills. My grandpa’s on the lookout for remnants of the old plank roads through the dunes as we pass by. All I can think of is Peter O’toole riding a camel.

Yuma, AZ

“Do you have the attitude to match that red hair?” Is the first thing I hear from Smokey as he shakes my grandpa’s hand. “I can say things like that, you know, I’m married to a redhead, so I know about the temper.” Smokey’s a big man: at least six feet and borderline rotund with a thick graying mustache flayed over his upper lip. His cowboy boots thud as he walks out onto the porch of his trailer home turned office, squat in the middle of his gravelled RV lot just past mile marker 11 outside of Yuma, Arizona. He thuds, I realize, because he doesn’t bend his knees as we walks. He’s got a silver belt buckle and a murky indistinguishable tattoo up his forearm and if he says one more thing about redheads I’m gonna go all beserker on him. Or at least I’d like to think I would.

“Smokey hasn’t sold my goddam camper van in the last five months,” my grandfather told me earlier. “How in the hell is he gonna sell it when he’s this far outta town?” Now here we are, face to face with Smokey, and the big man begins to protest:

“But the season, why it’s just beginning now,” Smokey is gleaming the salesman smile. “All them snowbirds gonna be coming down from Canada…” My grandpa gives him a look that says I’m takin’ what’s mine, and Smokey quits yammering about sellin’. “Well sir,” he says, “I’ve got her right over here.”

“Alright kids, this is it,” grandpa says, coming in for a hug. “And thanks for the lift!”

I don’t necessarily want to abandon my Grandfather in this godforsaken RV lot a stone’s throw from Mexico, but it’s what he wants and he’s damn near eighty so I figure he can do as he pleases.

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Gila Bend

We’re skating the Blood Meridian. On our left are the infinite and sandworn flats of southern Arizona, El Norte. On our right is a wire fence and beyond that, Sonoran Mexico vanishing in the folds of deep lavender hills that melt into the distant spectrum of winter desert sky. Specifically, that desert, having always lived on the valence of my cognizance through mountaintop vistas in El Cajon, through hearsay, and through literature, is beyond the reaches of my actual knowing. Oh, Mexican desert where Jaguars walk and Coyotes prowl, were the bones drying on the sides of the roads are of not just the bovine variety.

We’re stopped at a border checkpoint and a patrolman in aviators (I kid you not) peers into our car, the name on his uniform: Jimenez. “Be safe now,” Jimenez says, and waves us by.

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Chandler, Arizona

I cannot believe I am in a restaurant called Famous Dave’s, and Famous Dave’s logo is a pig BBQ’ing a rack of ribs. Oh, and there’s a neon sign: the outline of a pig enclosing the word ‘Meat’, where the ‘M’ flashes on and off. “Eat…Meat…Eat…Meat…Eat…Meat…” the sign proclaims ad nauseum. Everything around this place is newly made, old timey BBQ decor, but all I can see is factory farming, environmental degradation, broken and irresponsible food systems, obesity and rampant heart disease. But it’s what my family wants, so I bite my lip and say ‘no thanks’ to the ribs. I’d rather survive on Le Trailmix From the Back of My Car, thank ye kindly.

reference frames

Sunrise over the San Joaquin Valley, first light meeting with sky cresting the silhouettes of Livermore windmills. Dropping down, over the hill and into the till, at once liquid goldenrod bubbles up from behind the tanglestemmed almond orchards, revealing a fertile and windswept expanse: the cows licks of jet black on browned and flattened grass, the Aqueduct a silver serpentine gently contorting up the Valley center, the Sierras in the East somewhere invisible.

North is at my back and all of my life is in the trunk of my car. Mere hours ago I stood in my half dark and half empty room, contemplating the redness in the corners of my eyes. Berkeley, I can hardly believe this is it. But, something tells me I’ll be back. I’ve lived in a couple of places (not everywhere, of course) and I’ve never felt more at home than I do in the Bay. For now, though,  SoCal, suburbia, and desert Christmas await. Surely, traveling, and changing, slides by easier when you’re just barely conscious, accelerated forward by the strange magnetism of the unknown laid out before.

…men ej skiljas…

…från vännen min, utan att fälla tårar.

First World Problems

So, now I have a Bachelor’s degree. In the wake of all the celebration, I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve done nothing but wrong this semester. I sunk the first half of it wholeheartedly into an experiment which was never carried out, and got behind in my classes. I sunk the rest of it into preparing for the Physics GRE and grad school applications (and maintenance managing), but nevertheless, as I discovered mid finals week, I failed epically. In the midst of my “oh, shit what do I do now?” moment, which lasted several days, I ended up getting a not so stellar grade on my Math final, a class I had previously ignored due to the “grad schools won’t see this semester” mantra I had foolishly been repeating to myself all semester. Ain’t gonna be easy, is it?

However, if I’ve learned one thing at Berkeley, it’s that you have to acknowledge your own shortcomings, but not let them destroy you. So, onwards.